Seminar by Dr. Frederic Giroire (Université Côte d’Azur & CNSR)

Speaker: Dr. Frédéric Giroire
                Université Côte d’Azur & CNSR

Title: Optimizing rule placement in Software-Defined Network (using Compression)

Date: Wednesday, October 5th, 2016

Time: 11 a.m

Place: EV3.309

ABSTRACT

Software Defined Networking (SDN) is gaining momentum with the support of major manufacturers. While it brings flexibility in the management of flows within the data center fabric, this flexibility comes at the cost of smaller routing table capacities. Indeed, the Ternary Content Addressable Memory (TCAM) needed by SDN devices has smaller capacities than CAMs used in legacy hardware. We investigated compression techniques to maximize the utility of SDN switches forwarding tables. We validate our algorithm with intensive simulations for well-known data center and ISP topologies, to study its efficiency and compression ratio for a large number of forwarding rules. Our results indicate that the algorithm scales well, being able to deal with around a million of different flows with less than 1000 forwarding entry per SDN switch, requiring negligible computation time. To assess the operational viability of the algorithm in real networks, we deployed a testbed able to emulate a k=4 fat-tree data center topology. We demonstrate on one hand, that even with a small number of clients, the limit in terms of number of rules is reached if no compression is performed, increasing the delay of new incoming flows.The solution, on the other hand, reduces drastically the number of rules that need to be stored, with no packet losses, nor detectable extra delays if routing lookups are done in ASICs. Hence, both simulations and experimental results suggest that our solution can be safely deployed in real networks, providing compression ratios between 70% and 99%.

BIO

Frédéric Giroire is a research scientist at CNRS since 2008 inside the joint team Coati between I3S (CNRS, University of Nice-Sophia Antipolis) laboratory and Inria. He received his Ph.D. from the University Paris 6 in 2006. He worked for 6 months in the research labs of Sprint (California) in 2002 and for one year in Intel Research labs (Berkeley) in 2007, leading to 3 patents. His research interests include algorithmic graph theory and combinatorial optimization for network design and management issues, software defined networks and network virtualization.